Monday, November 28, 2016

Here we go again.

He
considered any publicity good. He “spun
one narrative after another that was palpably untrue, [finding it] …next to
impossible to say anything that is not in some crucial way untrue.”“He [didn’t] let anybody get too close.…Those who worked with him found him
curiously elusive.”He had no interest
in briefing books.“No one had ever
entered the White House so grossly ill informed.” Sound familiar?This is how the distinguished historian and
UNC Professor Emeritus William Leuchtenburg described Ronald Reagan in his 2015
book, The American President.So
what Gerald Ford might have aptly called our current “Nightmare” isn’t entirely
new.Here we go again.

I couldn’t
help being struck by the similarities between the Gipper and the Donald.Reagan was sworn in at age seventy, so too
will Trump. Being six months older he
will be the oldest ever.Both disregarded
facts on the stump and beyond.Periodic
fabrication and outright lying is something Reagan took all the way through his
tenure. It reached its peak late in his
second term when he denied both selling arms to Iran and funding the
Contras.Leuchtenburg contends that his
actions – trading with an enemy and unauthorized arming – constituted
impeachable offences.Only because
Democrats (who controlled Congress) feared having to face George HW Bush as an
incumbent in the upcoming election did he escape prosecution. Reagan represented the then radical right of
his party much as Trump represents an extreme today.We Americans have a short memory and may have
forgotten how ominous we thought the Reagan presidency would be.We survived.

Survived,
but Reagan, the GOP mythical icon, had a profound and lasting impact on the
country’s direction.So much so that twelve
years on, Bill Clinton, despite liberal inclinations, determined his only path
to the presidency lay in pulling his party to the right of center, to govern as
a New Democrat.That produced,
among others, “an end of welfare as we know it”, (after pushback from the
military) “don’t ask don’t tell” and “three strikes”.It wasn’t enough for the opposition. Tokened by Newt Gingrich’s “Contract” the
right never lost its focus on regaining power and extending Reagan’s conservative
“revolution”.Barack Obama moved further
left but met bitter resistance from the start.His progressive legislative initiatives had no Republican support and
others had to be accomplished by Executive Orders, many of which can – probably
will – be reversed by Trump.Democrats
are said to be the majority party – Hilary Clinton outpolled him in November’s
election – but that “majority” has proved ephemeral.Republicans, dominated by the hard right, hold
the executive mansion in a majority of states and beginning in January will control
all three branches of the federal government. We will survive Donald Trump, but not without
paying a significant price.The Supreme
Court, especially, is likely to skew conservative for decades to come.

I reach back
to Reagan’s election and our survival as a reassurance, but that doesn’t mean
we should be sanguine about the immediate future.Quite the contrary.The fact that there are similarities between
Trump and Reagan doesn’t mean they are the same.I ran into Bill Leuchtenburg here in Chapel
Hill a few days before the election and we shared our dismay in watching the 2016
campaign.I said that to my knowledge,
there had never been anything like it, never a candidate like Trump.He concurred, and of course from the perspective
of a scholar who, unlike an opinion blogger like myself, actually can back up
his assessment with a lifetime study of the presidency.I’m privileged to live in the same community
and to have him as an acquaintance.

In significant
ways, Donald Trump is very different than Ronald Reagan.Professor Leuchtenburg describes Reagan’s
politics as “divisive”; Trump’s are polarizing. While being “grossly ill informed” relative to
earlier presidents, Reagan had served as governor of our largest state.Trump has zero government experience, which
makes him not merely ill informed but inexperienced and totally unprepared.Like Reagan, Trump is a performer who knows
how to move and indeed manipulate a crowed, but unlike him he has shown himself
to be an obsessive misogynistic and xenophobic narcissist.Also, while Reagan worked within a clear
ideological framework and surrounded himself with experienced people, Trump
seems to function with no such compass, relying on loyalists, some with no
credentials for carrying out their assigned job.Perhaps most important, Reagan may have been
a rightist ideologue, but was never mean spirited.His persona didn’t give license to the kind
of audience hate speech that often was heard at Trump rallies nor did he give
an essential White House role to the likes of the alt-right Steve Bannon. We know what Reagan did as president, we don’t
yet know what Trump will do once he is sworn in on January 20.His actions since November 8 are hardly
reassuring, in fact they point to our worst fears not our best hopes.His continued use of tweets, the latest to
claim that absent millions of fraudulent ballots he would have won the popular are
frightening. But we’ll have to wait and
see.

Our first and
still relatively primitive car “GPS” systems offered us less than perfect turn
by turn directions from here to there. To say that the resulting trips were
often circuitous, even torturous, would be an understatement.Following such directions once took me on an
hour long drive to a destination I discovered upon arrival was just fifteen
minutes away.The American story is very
much like those circuitous road trips; the opposite of a straight line.More often than not, that means two steps
forward and one back or even one step forward, two back. President Obama likes to refer to our
democracy as “messy”. It can be very
frustrating, even unnerving.Mirroring
the human condition, it is complex not simple.We should keep that in mind when characterizing this past (or any) election
and those who drove its perplexing outcome.

Trump
voters, and indeed voters in general, are not a monolith.One vote can reflect current views and
emotions, but long term it can’t change fundamental facts.For some, this election represented a white person’s
rebellion against a change in our racial and ethnic balance – of who is in
control – but it can’t alter demographics.Some voters may have expressed discomfort with growing secularization or
marriage equality.That won’t alter the
views or practices of the upcoming generation.Some – more than would admit – simply didn’t want a woman in the Oval
Office. But that will come to pass, must
come to pass.Some, as evidenced by a
rise of hateful speech and actions, are simply bigots.They represent not only something
reprehensible but also a real danger that dare not be underestimated or
overlooked.It will present a test for
the new president’s own identity and intent.Much, perhaps most, of the vote expressed frustration about the economic
and social stalemate that has come to characterize their lives and, worse, spell
a dismal outlook for their children’s future.

One thing is
for certain.None of us, regardless of
how we affiliate or how we voted, should either over read or under read the results.Warning signs were and are present for both
Republicans and Democrats, for the right and the left.Whoever is up at bat, should understand that at
present “all is not well in Mudville”. Victory
parties and loss wakes should not be read as more than they are, another
fleeting moment in time.Work will be
required to repair our still imperfect union, step by often painful step.We’ve seen much in the past, ups and
downs.Here we go again on another roller-coaster
ride, but let’s not allow ourselves to be either complacent or cynical.What comes after this is not inevitable, but
rather lies in our hands. If many like
myself were deeply disappointed, indeed shocked, by the election results, I
believe many of those who voted for Trump, who believed his unrealistic promises,
are destined to be deeply disappointed by what is to come, what is not to come.We’ll have to find a way of coming together
if we want to move forward.

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About Me

A branding consultant with decades of experience working with large global clients and brands, he now serves primarily young startup companies. Beginning his professional life as a rabbi of a large urban congregation, he has watched the numbers of the religiously unaffiliated grow in the years since leaving the pulpit. His book, Transcenders: Living beyond religion and the religion wars (available on Amazon) considers this phenomenon. Beyond his consulting practice Prinz spends much of his time writing, including this Blog. He posts to "Beyond All That" only when there is something to say that might add value to the conversation.